Hope everyone is staying safe at the moment given the current state of the world!

I’m currently in self-isolation and decided to use the time productively. I’ve started work on a medieval style castle, not sure yet how big it will be! or what the overall setting will be for the scene.

All objects regardless of it’s shape and method they were added are made of vertices placed in 3d space connected to each other with edges and faces. It’s not just they way it is in Blender. All software that uses 3d graphics work this way including games and even google earth.

There is no such a thing as wireframe system. Wireframe is just a preview of vertices and edges, so a display option and not a method or a workflow.
I hope it will clear things up for you

I like it very much !
What is it intended for ?
A game maybe ? Realtime rendering ? ( IMHO it’s low-poly enough for this )

Some ages ago i modeled this kind of modular castle parts and it was very handy for ‘generic’ castle building.
Unfortunately, medieval castle builders used to build walls and towers all different
The main reason is that castles were built/partly destroyed/rebuilt/partly redestroyed/etc…

This is the reason why for Carcassonne 3D medieval city i rebuilt each wall/tower/inner room in a separate .blend…
This requires a big amount of time but it is the price for fidelity to reality.

Anyway, your models are really nice !

If you allow me 2 remarks though:

The 2-colors towers and walls make the models less realistic
In old days, castles were built with all the same stone blocks often all coming from the same dig.
—> the reason why carcassonne is built with really different kind of stones is that it was almost entirely rebuilt from ruins in 1876

You should dirty your walls.
for this you can use a secondary UV map that you’ll blend with your diffuse map.
The dirtmap i use is this one: ( it’s a JPG one. i use TGA format as it’s a lossless format )…

EDIT: at last but not least, i think it would be interresting to introduce some irregularities in your models.
This would make them not clones of one-another.
For this, and though am not sure of what could be done ( I lack of time for doing tryouts ), the SORCAR procedural addon might be of some help…

I’m planning this to be a series of high quality renders, rather than a game model.

My plan initially was to build things in a modular fashion so that I could quickly work out a proper layout of the castle, then go back and “spruce up” each element.

I’ve already got a very basic grunge texture build into the shader, but you’re definitely right that it needs more dirt and grime. You also make a good point about the two-tone colours, I’ll have a play around with the shaders and textures.

Maybe you could consider texture arrays so that you can easily change textures without the UV wraping trouble ( that i use to have )

Texture splatting is also kinda must have so that you can easily draw stones irregularities/differences on the walls. I implemented this in blender in unity for Carcassonne 3D but it became a no-go for realtime rendering on low-end android mobile devices

hi all
it’s been some day since i posted !
and here am i back with some new thingies.
blender handles atlases, but unfortunately dont handles texture arrays.
I had to find some tricks and i’d say shader almost works fine for splatting textures
Tho it’s not yet finished, here’s a pic of the very first model i posted here that i reworked and rendered quickly:
[splatted-barbacane-st-louis]
I now have to do the same thing for ground textures and then… rework all …

But if you don’t plan to real-time render your meshes on low-end devices this really gives a great visual enhancement ^^
Just because castle walls suffered from time and armies attacks…
I guess it could even be randomly set up procedurally with a noise texture and building heights with a simple rule: The higher is a building the more probable it fell and was rebuilt
as an illustration here’s one wall from carcassonne you can see on google street view

Okay for the ‘spruce up’ it’s a really good method ( i’d say it is IMHO the best one ) when you don’t need to model inside rooms and corridors. Care not to fall in the trap i fell: scene from models lib where finally each model was different x))

I don’t know what will be your final renderer, but if it’s intended to be kinda realtime, you should also consider AO global map.
For still pics, AO is natively rendered by Cycles, then all is okay. But in realtime, AO is extremely GPU stressing. What i do for carcassonne 3D is huge maps of 8K where i store my walls/towers AO bake ( and dirt ). This way the final rendering GPU only have one diffuse map and one dirt/AO map to blend and render. Wich is pretty fast to render even on slower GPUs.

Updated all the shaders to make the walls and towers more uniform, and added grunge/dirt maps. Although I do think I may need to add more as it’s not as dirty yet as I’d possibly like.

I’ve played around with the layout a couple times and I think I’ve settled on this now, although I’m not ruling out changing it further down the line. I don’t want to start poking holes in the mesh for the doorways to towers etc until I’m definitely happy with this.

I’ve also added adaptive subdivision and micro-displacement which I think has drastically improved the look. As always any thoughts or comments appreciated.